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Might Be Giants: Top Story: Might Be Giants – Prince Rama

The story of how Prince Rama‘s three young members met sounds like bullshit at first. A trio of recent art school grads who chant about internal exploration of the mind, play tribal drums and spaced-out synths, sing songs with titles like ‘Panoptic Yes’ and ‘Gita Nagari’, and coincidentally met while being raised in a Hare Krishna farm community in Florida, thus influencing them to perform call-and-response Sankrit chants and mantras influenced by Krishna services? It sounds too good to be true, but in fact, their claimed history is 100% real talk and 110% awesome, inspiring, captivating, intriguing–as are their records and live shows.

Prince Rama leading yoga and performing at the Silent Barn in NY, February 2009:

Prince Rama is sisters Taraka and Nimai Larson and their friend Michael Collins. The trio formed while attending high school near Alachua, Florida (a town with the largest Hare Krishna community in the Western Hemisphere) and then spent several years in Boston while all three members attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. They moved to Brooklyn early in 2010, where they are clearly one of the most creative forces playing around at the moment. After SXSW 2010, Prince Rama were picked up by Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks Records, who have also released records by Ariel Pink and Eric Copeland.

Before signing with Paw Tracks, Prince Rama spent years touring relentlessly around the US and Europe. The band is known to distribute handmade percussion instruments at their live shows, where the crowds routinely have a ritualistic bounce and sway.